Plural Marriage as a Religious Practice

Plural Marriage as a Religious Practice occupies a contested place in the history traced by the book: once a canonized commandment at the center of Mormon theology, it became a point of public renunciation for the mainstream Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and a defining commitment for Mormon Fundamentalists. Its consequences reach beyond the marriage of one man to several women. The doctrine connects claims of revelation to political resistance, church governance, family organization, and the authority to determine who belongs to the faithful.

Doctrine and religious authority

Plural marriage was not presented as a marginal custom in Joseph Smith’s church. It was canonized in Section 132 of the Doctrine and Covenants, a primary scriptural text. The doctrine made marriage part of the terms of salvation: Joseph taught that a man needed at least three wives to attain the fullness of exaltation, and that those to whom the law was revealed were required to obey it. In this account, plural marriage therefore became a test of obedience to revelation, not simply a private choice or a social practice.

The teaching also shaped the authority claimed by successive leaders. After Joseph Smith’s death in 1844, Brigham Young led the Saints west to the Great Basin, where the community openly embraced plural marriage. The practice was disclosed to ordinary members during the migration west, at Sugar Creek, Iowa, in 1846; outside the community, however, leaders continued to deny it for years. The contrast between internal religious obligation and outward denial became part of what historian D. Michael Quinn termed theocratic ethics, and what Mormons called lying for the Lord.

Brigham Young defended plural marriage as religious freedom and argued that divine law took precedence over the laws of men. The community’s claims thus concerned both the right to practice a religious doctrine and the power to decide which law would govern. At Nauvoo, Joseph Smith had headed a theocratic principality with unusual sovereign powers and commanded the Nauvoo Legion. In Utah Territory, the same broader contest took institutional form: a Mormon-dominated legislature expanded local probate courts, whose judges were often bishops and whose juries were largely Mormon. Church authorities thereby exercised local legal power in a territory where federal jurisdiction was supposed to prevail. Plural marriage was one focus of a wider dispute over competing sources of law and legitimacy.

Political conflict and institutional change

The doctrine provoked sustained opposition in the United States. In 1856, presidential candidate John C. Frémont campaigned against both polygamy and slavery, grouping them as twin relics of barbarism. President James Buchanan later sent the United States Army to Utah in an effort to dismantle Brigham Young’s theocracy and eradicate plural marriage. The Utah War did not remove Young from power or end the practice. Judicial and legislative challenges continued, culminating in the Edmunds-Tucker Act of 1887, which disincorporated the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and forfeited church property worth more than $50,000 to the federal government.

Under this pressure, church leaders publicly renounced plural marriage in 1890. The book emphasizes the gap between that public change and what followed: leaders quietly sent groups to establish plural-marriage colonies in Mexico and Canada, while some senior authorities secretly continued taking multiple wives and performing plural marriages well into the twentieth century. Eventually, however, the church adopted a more pragmatic political course, rejected the practice emphatically, and began urging government agencies to prosecute polygamists. That shift helped the church gain acceptance as a conventional faith and, in the book’s account, was crucial to its transformation into a widely recognized American religion.

Fundamentalists interpret the same history in the opposite way. They regard the renunciation as an unforgivable compromise with the federal government and argue that the mainstream church abandoned a central theological commitment for political acceptance. By continuing to uphold plural marriage, they claim to preserve the true faith. Their frequent appeal to Section 132 makes scriptural continuity a central measure of religious legitimacy; the breach between the two communities is therefore not merely a disagreement about household arrangements, but a dispute over who has kept faith with Joseph Smith’s revelations.

Household structures and personal consequences

The doctrine’s claims were enacted through highly unequal family structures. In Colorado City, Rulon Jeffs had an estimated seventy-five wives and at least sixty-five children. Several wives were married to him at fourteen or fifteen, when he was in his eighties. His sermons emphasized submission and obedience, while his teaching drew heavily on nineteenth-century writings by Joseph Smith and Brigham Young. The book describes a system in which religious leadership could shape marriage arrangements and define the obligations of women and men within the household.

State law and religious marriage did not necessarily coincide. Because plural marriage was illegal in Utah and Arizona, men in Colorado City typically had a legal marriage with only their first wife; later wives were spiritually married but remained unmarried in the eyes of the state. This arrangement also allowed large households to qualify for public assistance. The result was a divided legal status: the community treated these women as wives under church authority, while the state did not recognize those marriages.

Debbie Palmer’s family history illustrates how plural marriage could produce kinship relations difficult to map by ordinary terms. At fourteen, she felt she had received a divine impression that she should marry Ray Blackmore, the community leader. Prophet LeRoy Johnson approved the match and, a year later, married her to Blackmore, then fifty-seven and ailing. Debbie became his sixth wife and stepmother to his thirty-one children, most older than she was. Because Blackmore was also the father of her stepmother, she became a stepmother to that stepmother and, in effect, a stepgrandmother to herself.

The relationships shifted again after Blackmore’s death. Debbie’s father, Dalmon Oler, became Bountiful’s leader, but Winston Blackmore forced him from power in 1985 and took over leadership. Debbie and Winston became bitter enemies while remaining bound by overlapping family ties: she was his stepmother despite being only a year older, her oldest daughter was his half-sister, and Debbie’s sister became one of his wives. Another of Ray Blackmore’s children, Alaire, had been adopted by him; at eighteen she married her adoptive father, becoming both Debbie’s stepdaughter and cowife. Later she married Debbie’s father and then Winston, who was her brother by adoption. These relations show how authority and marriage could repeatedly reorganize a person’s place within an extended family.

The power to define family membership also extended to the priesthood. When DeLoy Bateman stopped attending a weekly priesthood meeting, Rulon Jeffs sent someone to take away DeLoy’s wives and children, whom church doctrine treated as belonging to the priesthood rather than exclusively to a husband or parent. Both wives refused to leave DeLoy, and all their children except the three oldest became apostates along with them. Their decision made visible the personal stakes of religious dissent: leaving the community’s authority could threaten family unity, while loyalty to a spouse could itself be cast as disloyalty to the priesthood.

Law, identity, and continuing controversy

Plural marriage remains a point of conflict not only between religious communities and the state, but among groups making competing claims about liberty and harm. Mormon Fundamentalists have received support from the American Civil Liberties Union and gay-rights activists in arguments against government intrusion into private life, even though FLDS doctrine condemns homosexuality. On the other side, radical feminists have joined the resolutely antifeminist mainstream church in supporting aggressive prosecution of polygamists. These uneasy coalitions reveal how claims about religious freedom can bring together groups whose broader moral and political commitments sharply diverge.

Fundamentalist advocates describe plural marriage as a constitutionally protected religious practice and argue that the state should not intrude into their homes. Yet polygamy is illegal in all fifty states and in Canada, and the book places those liberty claims beside evidence of gendered authority, imposed family arrangements, and the vulnerability of women and children within some communities. The tension cannot be reduced to a simple choice between religious freedom and state power: the competing questions include who may define a marriage, whose consent and interests count, and which authority can govern a household.

The book’s account ultimately treats plural marriage as a continuing fault line in Mormon history. For the mainstream church, its abandonment enabled a new political and social standing; for fundamentalists, abandoning it meant surrendering a sacred obligation. Within communities that retain it, the doctrine can organize households and reinforce priesthood control, while its legal status exposes a clash between religious and state definitions of marriage. Its history thus binds theology to institutions and private family life to public power, leaving the dispute over its meaning unresolved.